I’ve been working a lot lately with generating emails from within Drupal. I was asked how to create a Token of a piece of Drupal content (a Node). Even when not coding in Drupal — tokens can be very useful! A token in Drupal-lingo is:

Tokens are small bits of text that can be placed into larger documents via simple placeholders, like %site-name or [user]. The Token module provides a central API for modules to use these tokens, and expose their own token values.

Modules may provide their own tokens using drupal Hooks. As of Drupal 7 Tokens are apart of Drupal-core.

Sample token api usage for defining or using tokens

But, the ability to create a token of a full Node view is not possible out of the box. Thankfully, with a bit of searching we can find a Community module that provides this feature to our website. The Advanced Entity Token (AET) provides tokens for entities and their view modes:

Examples
[aet:node:1] will return the 1st node with the token view mode (or full if token is not available).

[aet:file:1:view-original] will return the 1st file entity with the original view mode.

[aet:taxonomy_term:1:name] will return the 1st node title field (note that this level of chaining is done by the formal token implementation of the node entity in token/token.tokens.inc -> token_token_info()).

Note that the AET module depends on both the Token and Entity Token modules.

So by using the AET you could create an email template Node Type, which could use Tokens too by the way, which is a Drupal node (content) that you could then embed in a piece of outgoing email by using this node as the message body using [aet:node:NID]. If you don’t want these email template node(s) to not show up on your site from Google or site searches I recommend using the RabbitHole module.

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